Letters: Not again.

Jayant Narlikar's 'Challenge for the big bang' (19 June) is, like all steady-state hypotheses, thought-provoking. If anything, it provokes a bit too much thought.

So far as I know, no steady stater has ever alluded to some rather unpleasant but, to my mind, inescapable natural consequences if one believes that the Universe is infinite and eternal in itself, with only it constituents changing, that is, creating themselves in 'little big bangs' limited in time and place, and then dying off over the aeons as the second law of thermodynamics takes its toll. This is the problem of eternal recurrence, the nightmare scenario that, in an eternal, infinite Universe, all possible occurrences are doomed to repeat themselves endlessly, both in infinite variation and in infinite exactitude.

Of course, unpleasant consequences do not make a hypothesis any the less tenable. Nevertheless, I would urge Narlikar, Hoyle, Bondi, Gold, et al to think ...

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